Dan Estabrook: Dumb Skulls and Souvenirs

Public Lecture 

November 3, 2026, 5:30 pm (Wilson Hall – Concert Hall)

About the Exhibition

Dan Estabrook is a contemporary artist based in Brooklyn, New York. His work engages nineteenth-century photographic processes alongside drawing, painting, and sculpture. The works in the Dumb Skulls series are ambrotypes on black glass, while the works in Souvenirs are tintypes, some of them incised or altered. Estabrook’s practice explores themes of memory, loss, and the subjective nature of historical narrative. He writes, “Using 19th-century techniques and celebrating their flaws and failures, I make seemingly anonymous photographs in order to reimagine a more personal history of photography, seen from a 21st-century perspective. With these processes, I can create my own ‘found photos’ – highly personal objects in which to hide my own secrets and stories. I am not interested, simply in re-creating the past, instead, I wish to make contemporary work inspired by the ever-growing gap between what we know of the past and how we understand the present.”

Estabrook earned his B.A. from Harvard University and his M.A. from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champagne. He has taught and lectured across the United States, with recent solo and group exhibitions at the Penland Gallery, Penland, NC; Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, Charleston, SC; University of Kentucky Art Museum, Lexington, KY; and Daniel Cooney Fine Art, New York, NY. Estabrook has received grants, awards, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New England Foundation for the Arts, and the Peter S. Reed Foundation, among others. His first monograph, titled Forever & Never, was published by Artsuite in 2025.